The lord is my shepherd

I shall not want

But there was the rub. I did want.

I wanted my man, John Indian.

I wanted to be out of this prison, where the silver eyes of rats stared at you as if to say, ‘Why have you invaded our space?’

I wanted to see Betty again.

I wanted to cook again and have wholesome food instead of the slops they gave us here.

I wanted to breathe fresh air again.

There was a lot I wanted and I wasn’t gettin’ any of it here.

What I saw around me was worse than what I suffered.

Poor Dorcas Good, just out of infancy at four years old was attached to the wall held in irons. The look on her face, one of complete anguish, scarred my soul. When she should have been free to walk in grass and hear birds sing, here she was in this dismal prison. God forgive me, but I thought looking at her she would be better dead.

Her sister, the baby had died. Is there any wonder, it did? Sarah Good, when they took the dead baby from her, was silent, her face vacant. I thought of the time my baby died; how I screamed, clawed the air and had the community behind me to share my grief and console me. But here in this dungeon of a prison, Sarah Good did not scream, did not speak, and did not eat.

Instead she stared into space. She appeared to have lost the will to live. Sarah, who always had something to say about anything and everything. The change in her troubled me. I wanted to hold her but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. Sarah Good was somewhere else where she could not be reached.

I gazed at Sarah Osburne, encrusted in bitterness that she had been named, not by the girls, but by Sarah Good, out of malice. But in the end, it didn’t matter who named who; once a name was proffered, it was a like meat thrown to hungry lions in an arena. Observing Sarah Osburne, I knew that, although she would last longer, her fate was the same as that of the poor babe. She had been used to comfort and was proud, free spirited and that could not survive this. Barbados, even at its worst, was never as bad as this. We were three isolated women who could not give, or couldn’t care about giving comfort to one another. We were all alone.

Barbados; scenes lurked in my mind. I imagined the endless blue sky and the endless green-blue water and the sound of the birds screeching and the smell of giant flowers and the taste of salt on the tongue. I needed those images to survive the horrors I was witnessing.